Your breasts were formed, your hair grew, but you were naked and bare. You ate pastry of fine flour, honey, and oil. You were exceedingly beautiful, and succeeded to royalty.
Such things should not happen, nor be. Were your acts of harlotry a small matter, 21 "that you have slain My children and offered them up to them by causing them to pass through the fire? You offered yourself to everyone who passed by, and multiplied your acts of harlotry.
Yet you were not like a harlot, because you scorned payment. In that you gave payment but no payment was given you, therefore you are the opposite. They shall also strip you of your clothes, take your beautiful jewelry, and leave you naked and bare. I will be quiet, and be angry no more.
Yes, be disgraced also, and bear your own shame, because you justified your sisters. It was like the time of the reproach of the daughters of Syria and all those around her, and of the daughters of the Philistines, who despise you everywhere.
Jerusalem the faithless : It had been the genius of Hosea to understand the relationship between the Lord and His people in terms of the covenant of marriage, and he had drawn on the experiences of his own wife's unfaithfulness to demonstrate Israel's spiritual adultery. Hosea had stressed by contrast the faithful covenant-love that God still showed to His wayward bride Hosea Ezekiel drew on this analogy of the marriage-bond but couched it in terms which might well have been borrowed from a popular oriental tale of a foundling child being rescued by a passing traveler and eventually wedded by him.
